Thursday, January 17, 2013

enemies at home and abroad

Democracy depends on an independent, investigative, even "adversarial" press. Without the disinfectant of sunshine, corruption runs rampant in the halls of power...

While the trend toward corrupt, self-dealing statists buying a permanent voting majority with other people's money has been in place a long time, the collaboration of America's once proud press is stunning and new.

The print and broadcast media still dominate the national dialogue, and have succeeded in downplaying to outright non-coverage of everything damning to the Obama regime. It's as if Woodward and Bernstein helped Nixon cover up Watergate, and outed and smeared Deep Throat as a subversive crank.

Consider the economy. Remember the relentless drumbeat of "recession," "hardship," and "struggling families" stories during the George Bush I re-election campaign? We got none of that during the Obama re-election, despite the economy being much worse now than in 1992.

How about Benghazi? The incompetence, utter disregard for American lives, and cover-up should have been the final nail in Obama's re-election campaign, a Jimmy Carter foreign policy disaster after four years of a Jimmy Carter economy. But the media were more interested in criticizing Romney's statement on Benghazi than covering what actually happened.

Fast and furious, Black Panthers, warrantless wiretapping, drone strikes... the list goes on and on. How much did you hear about those in the mainstream media and how much would you have heard if a Republican were in office?

Journalists have always been left-leaning as a group and overwhelmingly always vote Democrat. But even when Journolist-ing, though they were using unethical tactics to manipulate an election, they could at least rationalize it by the notion that they were opposing those currently in power, i.e. a truly "adversarial" press. Now that their guy is entrenched in power, they no longer have that fig leaf.